Retro Retail: St. Paul's Raymond Commodore Amiga
Happy Mutant Bryan Day took a trip to Raymond Commodore Amiga, a store in St. Paul that specializes in only one very specific line of computing products. Bryan shot this gallery of the store's charmingly cluttered beige interior.
Raymond Commodore Amiga Photoset [Flickr]
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Funny, you live in St. Paul, but you never go to these places till bloggers come over. I feel like stopping by there just for a look-se.
That's an awfully shiny rainbow apple to have ever graced an amiga.
But count me in the same "local but never new it" camp.
I love the nearly organic accumulation of parts and computers evident in the photos. A time-lapse of the build-up of that inventory would be incredible.
I wonder if they would want my old Amiga 1000?
And.. I also can't help but speculate as to the motivation for hanging on to this market. I hope it works for him, though! It's really cool to see. I absolutely loved my Amigas, but am hopelessly unsentimental most of the time and have moved on. I had a 1000, 2000, then 3000. By the time the 4000 came out, their price/performance ratio had hit rock bottom. I still say the Amiga was the last computer that was fun to just use.
Good old Commodore stuff.
Back when I hung out at a computer shop it wasn't unusual for the proprietor to yank a "prop" C64 off the wall to sell to someone.
After a while he just put nails there to set them since invariably SOMEONE would come along looking for one and it was just easier that way.
True story.
This looks like one of those "hoarder" houses that you see photos of on the news. I get into cool vintage machines as much as the next computer engineer, but man, what a dump.
I believe the shop sustains itself through a combination of local neighborhood computer repairs (PC, Mac, and just about anything else) and custom repair jobs of Commodore computers and peripherals he receives by mail.
What impresses me most about this is that someone in America can have such an esoteric vocation and yet retain a physical "brick and mortar" storefront. That's admirable and great!
Man, my first computer was a Commodore 64, and my second was an Amiga 500.
I'd love to check this place out, if it weren't a bertrillion miles away.
Z80s and 6502s rule! CPM, S100 and all that. You think Pong is retro? How about Wumpus, hand coded in Machine Language (not Assembler)? I was building and programming 'micros' in the late '70s and wish I had kept my KIM-1 and OSI Superboard II. I do still have a... what is that thing?... Cromemco something or other holding up a shelf of vacuum tubes in the basement. Time to drag that out and add it to some teenager's collection.